ERIC Number: ED477864
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2000-Oct
Pages: 64
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Can Modern Information Technologies Cross the Digital Divide To Enhance Choice and Build Stronger Schools? Occasional Paper.
Schneider, Mark; Buckley, Jack
The Internet is a revolution unfolding before our eyes. There is concern that this revolution will increase class and racial differences and that a new digital divide between information haves and information have-nots will exacerbate existing levels of inequality in American society. This paper examines how the Internet has been tapped to deliver information about the schools in ways that either explicitly or implicitly try to cross the digital divide. First, the paper looks at several examples of websites that are trying to cross the digital divide by presenting local information about the schools. Second, the paper looks at the problems with harnessing the Internet as a tool for doing research about the schools. Third, the paper illustrates some of these problems by analyzing patterns of usage of one of these websites to see if actual usage shows patterns of inequality or expanded usage. The final section of the paper looks at the possibility of harnessing the Internet in a way that goes beyond the consumer-choice model embodied in most current school-based sites to a much more expansive citizen-based model of improving schools and, even more ambitiously, building stronger communities. (Contains approximately 87 references. (Author)
Descriptors: Citizenship, Community Change, Community Development, Computer Mediated Communication, Computer Use, Educational Change, Educational Improvement, Electronic Mail, Elementary Secondary Education, Information Dissemination, Information Sources, Information Technology, Internet, Parent Empowerment, Technology, World Wide Web
Teachers College, Columbia University, Box 181, 230 Thompson Hall, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027-6696. Tel: 212-678-3259; Fax: 212-678-3474; e-mail: ncspe@columbia.edu; Web site: http://www.ncspe.org. For full text: http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/publications_files/238_OP07.pdf.
Publication Type: Information Analyses; Opinion Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: Smith Richardson Foundation, Inc., Greensboro, NC.; National Science Foundation, Arlington, VA.
Authoring Institution: Columbia Univ., New York, NY. National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A